


The After-Battle Conversation

by Flavato_Forever



Category: Scorpion (TV 2014)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Light Angst, Paige and Toby friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 11:37:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7169468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flavato_Forever/pseuds/Flavato_Forever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paige and Toby debrief after a particularly dangerous mission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The After-Battle Conversation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katasstropheee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katasstropheee/gifts).



When Paige came out of the kitchen, armed with a glass of water and an aspirin, Toby was lying on the sofa, hands folded behind his head and legs up on the couch’s arm. Besides the lounging psychiatrist, the garage was empty; Sly was off visiting Megan, Walter had taken Ralph out on some errands, and Cabe and Happy were getting dinner. Paige normally loved an almost-vacant house -- it was rare occurrence for a single mom -- but at that moment, after the kind of case that had taken her much closer to death than anybody should ever have to go, something about the quiet was unsettling.

  
She went over to perch on the arm of the sofa, careful not to disturb Toby’s feet.

  
“Hey,” she said softly. Toby opened his eyes slowly, but it was clear from the alert look on his face that he hadn’t been sleeping.

  
“Hey.”

  
“How’s your rib?”

  
He moved his hand to his upper left side, pressing gently on the ice pack that was under his shirt. “Broken. Definitely broken. But broken in the name of saving the world, which is more than most broken ribs can say, so, you know.”

  
Paige had to smile. It was such a Toby thing to say. She held out the glass and the pill that were still in her hand. “Would this help?”

  
“Yeah, thanks.” He accepted the glass, managing to sip the water and swallow the pill without spilling anything on himself, all while remaining horizontal. Paige was impressed.

  
“Are you sure you don’t need to tape up your rib or anything?”

  
“You don’t tape up broken ribs. They heal on their own, as long as they haven’t punctured a lung.”

  
“And this one didn’t puncture a lung?”

  
“Nope. Just cracked a little bit; left all my majors organs alone. It’ll be good as new in a few weeks.”

  
It was the kind of thing that he might have said with his I-went-to-Harvard voice, a voice meant to instill a sense of inferiority in anyone listening. But instead he said it gently, like he had gotten the information from a quick Google search rather than an Ivy-league education.

  
“So that case…” Paige let her words hang there, waiting to see if Toby would pick them up.

  
“It was a rough one, yeah.”

  
Toby was interesting, from an emotional liaison’s point of view. He specialized in -- excelled in -- analyzing others’ emotions and yet consistently failed to address his own. Paige often found herself tiptoeing around talking with him, worried that he would catch on to what she was trying to do and avoid her attempts at help. But now, despite his casual position, splayed over the sofa, Paige could see he was shaken. He was better, she had found, at talking about Happy than he was at talking about himself, so she tried that route.

  
“Happy cut it close in that boiler room, huh?”

  
Toby nodded solemnly. “Yeah. She just doesn’t always seem to get it.”

  
“Get what?”

  
“Get… get the magnitude of the situation. Like when you and Walt were stuck on that train, and she had to manually flip the switch to make sure you didn’t crash? She just jumped right onto the track and started running without even telling any of us.”

  
“I mean, in her defense, she saved our lives.”

  
“She did. But she could have so easily gotten killed.”

  
Paige pursed her lips. Some part of her knew that, logically, there was an argument to be had about Toby worrying about the safety of the woman not on the out-of-control train while exhibiting much less concern for those on it, but, at that moment, she didn’t really want to get into it. She was about to point out all of the risks Toby himself had taken over the course of the two years she had known him -- going out alone in an arctic blizzard to search for Happy, for starters -- but she held her tongue on that point as well.

  
She thought of that day, when they were on the subway train, barreling through the tunnels underneath LA at ungodly speeds. She remembered watching Walter, after they had split up, as he disconnected his car and started to disappear into the darkness of the underground. For a few minutes, as her car slowed down and all the terrified passengers got off of it, she had truly believed that he was dead.

  
“What about you?” Toby asked.

  
Paige looked at him, eyebrows furrowed. “What?”

  
“The guards almost caught you in the computer room today. And then you had to jump off that car while it was moving. Are you okay?”

  
Paige automatically moved her hand to her left shoulder, which had knocked against the ground painfully when she jumped from the van Happy had hotwired for their mission. She had nearly forgotten that she started the conversation by mentioning Happy’s risk-taking earlier that day.

  
“You said I’m fine, remember? Nothing but a bad bruise.”

  
“That’s not what I meant.” Toby moved his feet down from the arm of the sofa so that he was sitting upright; Paige shifted to sit next to him. The ice pack slipped out from his shirt, and he placed it on the cushion beside his leg. “I mean, damn, Paige, you have a _kid_. The only reason I could stomach this job at first was that I was a guy with nothing to lose. And now, with Happy… I mean, I watch her almost die on a regular basis. Hell, I watch _myself_ almost die on a regular basis, and every single time I think of her. And you have Ralph waiting for you at home…” Toby shook his head. “I’m not passing judgement on your parenting skills here, but just… how do you _do_ it?”

  
Paige opened her mouth to speak and found her lower lip trembling. A lump had started to form in her throat. All of a sudden, she realized that she was no longer a liaison helping a genius deal with his emotions; she was just someone sitting with her coworker -- her friend -- trying to come to terms with the danger of their work.

  
She paused to compose herself before continuing.

  
“I don’t… I don’t know. I’m all Ralph has, you know? I mean, his grandparents are dead and Drew” -- she waved a hand dismissively -- “he’s off doing God-knows-what, coaching or something. If anything happened to me, there’s no one to stop Ralph from going off to foster care and growing up just like Happy did.”

  
“That’s not true,” Toby said softly. “There’s us.”

  
Something like a whimper came out of Paige. She laid her head on his shoulder, letting the tears that had been welling in her eyes fall down her cheeks. She thought of all their morning runs to Kovalsky’s, of all the late nights where one genius or another kept Ralph occupied while she finished her paperwork, of the team who had somehow managed to become her family over the course of the past two years.

  
“Thank you, Toby. But it’s still scary.”

  
She felt his shoulder shift slightly, and she guessed he was nodding.

  
“I know.”

  
They were both silent for a minute, and Paige focused on her breathing, on the feeling of her lungs filling with air. Until she started working with Scorpion, she had never thought of the ability to breathe as something to be thankful for.

  
The Chernobyl mission came to her mind, their time inside the reactor where she couldn’t inhale for fear of choking on noxious gas. A government doctor had checked her over as soon as they got home; she could still hear his gravelly voice telling her that the stress of the mission might have been as dangerous as the radiation exposure. It was a joke, she was almost certain, but it had stuck with her.

  
“Toby,” she said, because she was a worrier and he was a doctor and for some reason that made her feel like asking him a question was the right thing to do next, “what does the medical community say about the health effects of being in near-death situations all the time?”

  
Toby chuckled. “There’s not really a big enough sample size to conduct any research on that, unfortunately. But you don’t have to read many APA articles to know that prolonged exposure to stress is… not good.”

  
“ ‘Not good’?”

  
He shrugged, and the motion moved Paige’s head up and down slightly. “Increased fatigue, difficulty concentrating, unexplained irritability, and so on. They see that kind of thing a lot in police officers and firefighters and airplane pilots -- the kind of jobs where you’re responsible for the welfare of others.”

  
“So, not a perfect substitute for jobs where you have to disarm city-destroying bombs, but close?”

  
Toby laughed again, and Paige allowed herself to do so too, feeling a tiny bit of the pressure in her chest release.

  
“You’re funnier than I give you credit for, Dineen, you know that?”

  
“Yeah, you just don’t notice because you like to think you’re the funniest person on the team.”

  
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here. I didn’t say I wasn’t.”

  
Paige felt the honest, open moment slipping into a sort of banter, and she sighed. She didn’t really want to leave it like that, she realized -- she didn’t want their last words on the subject to be sarcastic.

  
“Do you ever have nightmares?” she murmured, trying to disperse the humor that had threatened to take over the conversation.

  
Toby shifted slightly, and Paige was sure he was going to shoot back a joke -- she was braced for a _yeah, especially after Happy makes me rewatch_ The Shining _with her_ \-- but instead he simply said, “Yeah, sometimes. You too?”

  
“Mm-hm.” Tears started to blur her vision again. “The other day Ralph woke me up in the middle of the night because I was yelling in my sleep.”

  
“What were you dreaming about?”

  
She shook her head, feeling the cloth of Toby’s jacket rub against her cheek. “I don’t even remember. You told me one time that people forget dreams if they don’t like them, didn’t you?”

  
“Yeah, a while ago. I’d forgotten I said that.” Both of their voices had fallen to whispers under the weight of their solemn topic.

  
“What do you dream about?”

  
Toby took a shaky breath, and Paige shifted her head to look at him; he was crying, too.

  
“I keep having this dream where Happy’s working on something in a building and the building collapses while she’s still inside. And then I yell her name over and over until I wake up.”

  
For a minute, Paige couldn’t think of anything to say. She thought back to how she used to comfort Ralph when he woke up in the middle of the night, screaming about monsters or vampires or some other little-kid nightmare, back before he stopped believing in those mythological evils. It had been so much easier to protect him from things that didn’t exist.

  
She wrapped one hand around Toby’s upper arm, right below her head, hoping the contact was comforting, and then said, “I guess you know all about the psychology of reoccurring dreams, huh?”

  
Toby exhaled quickly through his nose, a sort of pseudo-laugh. “Yeah.”

  
“Does that make it better?”

  
“No, sometimes -- sometimes it makes it worse. I just think of all the literature I’ve read on dreams and stress and relationships and…” He sighed. “It can get to be a lot, sometimes.”

  
“I can’t even imagine.” She used her thumb to twist the ring on her forefinger, watching the light from the lamp beside them dance on it. “It wasn’t like this before Cabe and I came, was it?”

  
“What, dangerous and deadly all the time? No. But it was still stressful, just in a different way.”

  
“Because the company was always flirting with bankruptcy?”

  
“Yeah. And there wasn’t any normalcy around to balance out all of the genius, you know? Walter would go days without eating while he was working on some new algorithm, and none of us would notice because we were busy going down our own rabbit holes. You and Cabe… You help us a lot, more than I think either of you realize.”

  
“So, if you had a choice,” Paige said slowly, still fiddling with her ring, “would you go back to before we became Homeland contractors?”

  
She looked at him again and saw an almost-smile coming across his face. “No, I really don’t think I would.” He looked down at her. “Would you?”

  
“What, go back to before I joined the team?”

  
“Mm.”

  
“No.” She said it almost without hesitation -- almost. “I mean, it sucks sometimes, like when we have to leave the country for a week and I don’t get to see Ralph, or I have to fill out a mountain of paperwork because one of you guys decides to blow something up” -- Toby chuckled at that -- “or when people start pointing guns at us. And sometimes Ralph will say these things, just little things, he says them so nonchalantly, but when he says them, I just know he knows. I know he realizes that there are days when I go out for cases and I might not come back. And, as a mom, that’s heart-breaking. But then I see the way he interacts with you guys, the way you’ve helped him come out of his shell, and I think it’s worth it.”

  
“It might be worth it for Ralph, but is it worth it for you?”

  
Paige thought about that for a minute. It wasn’t often, as a single mom, that people asked her questions like that.

  
“I mean, a few years ago, I was a waitress, and now I get to help save people’s lives every day. So yeah, I think it’s worth it for me, too.”

  
Just then, they heard Happy’s truck pull up in front of the garage. Paige lifted her head off of Toby’s shoulder and wiped at the tears around her eyes, thankful that she had chosen to wear waterproof mascara that morning. A minute later, Happy and Cabe walked in, armed with three paper bags’ worth of take-out.

  
“Dinner is here,” Cabe announced, holding up two of the bags triumphantly.

  
“I see you two didn’t manage to get the table set in the last half hour,” Happy said, setting the third bag down on Walter’s desk.

  
Paige and Toby looked at each other and laughed.

  
“I’m on it,” Toby said, hopping up. He looked amazingly chipper, considering the fact that he had been crying moments before.

  
Paige stayed on the sofa for a second, watching Toby and Happy dance around each other to set the food out. When Happy paused to open one of the containers, Toby walked up beside her and pressed a kiss to her temple.

  
“Are you sure your rib is okay?” Happy asked, leaning forward to place the container next to the basket of napkins.

  
“Positive, sweetheart,” Toby replied. Happy nodded slightly.

  
Just as they were sitting down to eat, Walter, Ralph, and Sylvester walked in.

  
“Look who we found roaming the streets of LA,” Ralph said, motioning to Sylvester.

  
Paige smiled at the odd sentence, something her son would definitely not have said two years ago. “It sounds like you’ve been spending a little too much time around Toby.”

  
“Impossible,” the psychiatrist cut in. “There’s no such thing as ‘too much time around Toby’.”

  
“Yes there is,” Happy and Walter said in unison, causing the whole team to erupt in laughter.

  
Ralph came over to sit next to Paige, who tousled his hair. “How were the errands, bud?”

  
“Good. I’m hungry now, though.”

  
“You heard the kid,” Cabe said. “Let’s eat.”

  
As soon as everyone finished filling their plates, the five geniuses in the room started talking about a physics problem Ralph was working on for his robotics class. Paige couldn’t follow the conversation -- phrases like “modulus of elasticity” hit her ears like a foreign language -- but she enjoyed the look of excitement that came over her son’s face while he talked.

  
And in that moment, sitting on a worn-out chair in an old garage, listening to a conversation that she would never be able to understand, Paige could not help but think that she was very, very lucky.


End file.
